Cray's XT3 Supercomputer Ships To Three Major Centers Vendor Spotlight

Cray Inc. reported that it has begun shipping the Cray XT3 supercomputer,
an industry standard massively parallel processing (MPP) system that
strongly advances the record-setting scalability and sustained application
performance of the renowned Cray T3D and Cray T3E systems. U.S. list
pricing for the Cray XT3 supercomputer begins at about $2 million.

The first shipment was to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National
Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Sandia National Laboratories
(Sandia). The Sandia system was developed and delivered under contract
for the Advanced Simulation & Computing (ASC) program. Other initial
customers include the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the DOE's
Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Cray XT3 supercomputer's architecture, co-designed with Sandia
as part of the $90 million "Red Storm" system contract, delivers scalable
application performance across a range of configurations from 200 to
30,000 processors, with peak performance of up to 144 teraflops (trillions
of calculations per second).

Cray has shipped a 10-teraflop portion of the "Red Storm" system to Sandia.
When fully installed, "Red Storm" will have over 40 peak teraflops of performance,
more than 11,000 AMD Opteron processors, and 240 terabytes of disk storage.
The system is expected to be at least seven times more powerful than Sandia's
current ASCI Red supercomputer on real-world applications.

That is just the beginning. "Today's Cray XT3 is the first in a series
of increasingly powerful scalable Cray products that exploit the Red Storm
architecture. The architecture will allow capability to be increased with
a simple processor upgrade," said Sandia's Bill Camp, Director of Computers,
Computation, Information and Mathematics.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL),
which selected the Cray XT3 system for their National Leadership Class
Facility computing initiative, is slated to receive a 20-teraflop Cray
XT3 supercomputer, along with a 20-teraflop Cray X1E vector MPP supercomputer,
in 2005. In May 2004, the DOE chose ORNL "to lead a partnership with
a goal of building the world's most powerful supercomputer by 2007," according
to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. ORNL plans to expand to a 100-teraflop
Cray system at Oak Ridge in 2006, and to move in 2007 to a system with
over 250 peak teraflops and up to 100 sustained teraflops on real-world
problems.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has signed a contract
for a 10- teraflop Cray XT3 supercomputer that can be expanded over
time. In a joint statement, PSC scientific directors Michael Levine
and Ralph Roskies said, "We are very enthusiastic about making this
new and powerful scientific instrument available to National Science
Foundation researchers. Remotely using part of the XT3 system which
will soon be shipped from Cray to PSC, we have successfully run the
Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS) from the Center for Analysis
and Prediction of Storms, led by Kelvin Droegemeier. Our ability to
execute this full application, a comprehensive regional to storm- scale
atmospheric modeling/prediction system, as well as our successes with
segments of other simulation programs, strongly indicates that it will
be a highly productive computational resource."

According to Rich Partridge, Enterprise Systems analyst with D.H.
Brown Associates, "Thanks to its blend of high performance computation
and robust communication, Cray's T3E was the leading MPP system for
years. The Cray XT3 becomes the logical successor. Employing updated
processor and interconnect technology, Cray again offers a highly scalable
MPP design, with a balance of computation and communication capabilities
that promises to deliver superior performance on real-world problems."

"The Cray XT3 supercomputer, designed in partnership with Sandia,
advances the achievements of the Cray T3D and Cray T3E, widely recognized
as the gold standard for MPP systems, as well as the ASCI Red supercomputer.
The Cray XT3 sets a new standard for the efficient scalability and
reliability of standard microprocessor-based system designs," said
Peter Ungaro, Cray senior vice president for sales, marketing and services. "On
real problems, the Cray XT3 system's balanced design will enable it
to outperform large-scale clusters with substantially greater theoretical
peak or Linpack (Top500) speed."

The Cray XT3 Supercomputer - Scalable By Design

The Cray XT3 supercomputer's high-bandwidth, low-latency design-purpose-built
for high performance computing (HPC) applications-delivers a much higher
percentage of peak performance in practice than HPC clusters and other
alternatives.

A high bandwidth, low latency interconnect with embedded communications
processing and routing offers total interconnect bandwidth of more
than 100 terabytes/second.

High speed, global I/O is scalable to over 100 gigabytes/second
of I/O (input/output) bandwidth and hundreds of terabytes of parallel
disk storage.

A tightly integrated management and operating system provides
high reliability and is designed to run full-system applications
to completion.

The system will be a major source of revenue for Cray in 2005, though
the company said that they have other major product launches planned
for next year as well.

Though no other customers are announced at this time, Cray believes
the XT3 fills a growing void in the industry for massively parallel
architectures. According to Cray, more customers are needing highly
scalable compute systems, and the company believes more orders will
be placed in the following year.

About Cray Inc.

Cray provides innovative supercomputing systems that enable scientists
and engineers in government, industry and academia to meet both existing
and future computational challenges. Building on years of experience
in designing, developing, marketing and servicing the world's most
advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of HPC
systems that deliver unrivaled sustained performance on a wide range
of applications. Go to http://www.cray.com for more information.